Spirit Dental Unlocks New Customer Growth with Full-Funnel Advertising
Spirit Dental is a top-rated insurance company that offers dental and vision insurance directly to consumers and through agents. Spirit plans are designed around real needs first, and help thousands of people protect their health and their wallets.
“Two Octobers has been a great long-term partner with us because they consistently bring new ideas to the table. The ability for our teams to collaborate on new initiatives has helped to build a robust, evolving marketing strategy that keeps our business growing.”
-Hallie Glenna, Marketing Director
The Challenge
Meet Growth Goals Without More Budget
Spirit Dental gets thousands of new customers each year. Digital marketing drives these acquisitions, with paid media playing a central role. The team faced an increasingly difficult challenge: growing customers each year while maintaining a flat budget. While Two Octobers had consistently met aggressive goals in the past, shifts in the competitive landscape and changes to advertising platforms made growth ever harder to attain.
The paid media focus had been on mid- and low-funnel traffic through Google Ads. However, we were starting to see a slowdown in conversions coming from search campaigns. Past testing focusing on cross-channel tactics such as YouTube conversion bidding and Display remarketing had yielded poor results with above target CPAs. Overcoming the performance plateau was going to require a different tack entirely.
The Solution
Broadening Upper-Funnel Reach
Two Octobers knew that improving performance required expanding advertising beyond low-funnel. Many consumers don’t simply search, click, and buy. Spirit Dental needed to build awareness and brand affinity, reaching consumers higher in the buying funnel, before they had already been captured by any of the numerous high-profile competitors in the space.
As part of this approach, we tested Google Demand Gen. This campaign type distributes ads across YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and the Google Display Network and leverages videos and other types of visually-appealing ads. We also incorporated a new Meta Ads campaign with focus on the top and middle parts of the funnel to help drive more brand awareness and conversion activity.
Coupled with our existing remarketing campaign, we hoped these new campaigns would improve our coverage of the entire funnel and help drive more conversions. To support these new campaigns, we used audience segmentation and tailored messaging, placements, and targeting with segments for different buyer personas.
The Outcome
Customer Acquisition Growth and Lower CPAs
The Google Ads cost per acquisition dropped by 35% at the same time that conversions increased 58% YoY. The client has seen record customer acquisition totals during typically slower periods, and beat the total 2025 customer goal by an incredible 23%.
Adjusting to a full-funnel paid media strategy wasn’t without challenges. It took diligent work over about four months—testing ad creative, adjusting settings—to get to the positive returns we were aiming for. By the fifth month, we were confident we had the right media and creative, and shifted more budget to the higher funnel campaigns.
With this full-funnel strategy, Two Octobers has been able to drive sustained performance improvements in our paid media efforts to help Spirit Dental achieve their aggressive annual acquisition goal, even without a matching increase in budget.